Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

Following the reviews I caved and picked this up on Steam and once I'd clocked Nier's second playthrough I managed to get a small run at this last night.

The game uses Norse mythology to tell its tale which opens with Senua rowing her makeshift canoe through a foggy river slowly. She is making her way to where she believes she will be able to gain access to the underworld in order to revive her dead lover. However, she's an unreliable protagonist who suffers from dillusions and has multiple voices in her head due to the mental trauma she has suffered which makes her unable to trust her own mind. Which leads to the first key point

Play the game with headphones or earphones on

The game tells you to do so in the start up screen, what this does is allow the sound to translate much better to the player as Ninja Theory have worked to make the audio design carry a lot of the tone, tension and experience in the game. Straight from the get go the sound shifts to give the impression of voices in your own head moving around you to recreate the experience Senua is having as she hears them question her actions and stoke her paranoia. So far, very little action has taken place but there's a cautiousness to my progression fuelled mostly by the audio design.

When combat does occur it's not that hard to get the upper hand of confrontations on Normal which limits the impact of death and it allowing the onset of the Rot that is consuming Senuas arm with each demise. LB is run, RB is block with the other buttons acting as light, hard and evade moves. It's a solid enough system with some weight to the animation.

The game is stunningly good looking much of the time, especially given its the work of 13 people and is explicitly a AA title which Ninja have been clear from the outset about. It uses Unreal Engine 4 and fluctuates with some objects looking simpler but many times its use of character models, animation and lighting is mesmerising. I'm running the game at native 4K at 30fps. The game can ben pushed higher but as it stands I have every option maxed and the framerate is pretty rock solid with the game playing responsively so given its genre type I've felt no need to change anything to pursue 60fps which is good as its one where its better to let the visuals shine.

It's certain to contain many visual treats in its 5-6hr run but I'm mostly intrigued to see how the psychosis angle plays out for Senua.

Hellblade is an independently developed, AAA quality game created by a team of 20 developers. Our aim is to bring back the mid-size game, so Hellblade is about half the size of a regular AAA game and sold at half the price.

I was all set to buy this only to discover it's a digital only release. I can't justify £25 on a game that I can't lend to friends, or sell on, or might be lost for ever when removed from the servers. I'll wait for the sales.

I'm knocking around the halfway marker and still very much enjoying this but the initial sheen has worn off somewhat now that I'm familiar with the gameplay loop and it does rob the game of a good chunk of its appeal.

and it makes the gameplay very predictable which means that you stop relying on the voices and narrative to maintain tension. The opening moments worked so well because you felt like you might not be able to trust Senua's senses and that she was in an unsafe environment but in reality it's a very stock experience and lacks surprises. Unless there's a surprise in the back end this has slipped to being a good game rather than a great one.

The game mostly continued as it went on. Probably the biggest issue was that as the number of enemies increases it strains the combat system that really favours low numbers vs the player so the fun of that aspect starts to disappear. It's not perfect but it remains very impressive considering the scale of the team behind it.